Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

September 05, 2017

In early 2016, when Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign was looking for a way to connect with supporters and recruit volunteers, it turned to Hustle, a mass texting platform that had been created barely 18 months earlier. Sanders eventually lost the Democratic nomination, but San Francisco-based Hustle hustles on, shifting its efforts toward the anti-Trump resistance. Hustle’s goals may be more overtly political than those of other technology startups, but the company’s name perfectly encapsulates an entire industry’s ethos: move fast, be aggressive, shake things up.

Hustle is far from a new word or concept; it’s been in the English lexicon for nearly 350 years. It comes from Dutch husselen, which means “to shake,” but it quickly developed additional senses in English, including “to crowd or push roughly,” “to obtain by fraud or deception,” “to steal,” “to beg,” and – by the 1920s – “to swindle.” (The noun form followed the same semantic route.) As early as 1825, a “hustler” was a thief; a century later, it could refer to a prostitute. Writing in the 1890s about his travels through “Our Great West,” Julian Ralph observed that “The key-note and countersign of life in these cities [of the U.S. West] is the word ‘hustle.’ We have caught it in the East. but we use it humorously, just as we once used the Southern word ‘skedaddle,’ but out West the word hustle is not only a serious term, it is the most serious in the language.”

June 15, 2017

Fox News is dropping its “Fair & Balanced” slogan, which was invented by Roger Ailes when he launched the network in 1996. Ailes died last month. “In the annals of modern advertising, ‘Fair & Balanced’ will be considered a classic,” writes Gabriel Sherman for New York. “The slogan was Ailes’s cynical genius at its most successful. While liberals mocked the tagline, it allowed Ailes to give viewers the appearance of both sides being heard, when in fact he made sure producers staged segments so that the conservative viewpoint always won. (If you haven’t read Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, I highly recommend it. Yes, it’s fair and balanced.)

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“At some point, we’ve all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colors,” writes Annalee Newitz in Ars Technica. “Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I've seen to date.” They include Bank Butt (a lavender-mauve), Grass Bat (dusty rose), Stoner Blue (grayish), and these winners:

May 08, 2017

America, we have lately been told – mostly but not exclusively by conservatives – has a “smug liberal” problem. The problem is characterized by “a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason,” wrote Emmett Rensin in Vox last month. It’s evident in the attitudes of late-night comedians, wrote David French last week in the National Review; its features include “the generous use of selective clips from Fox News, copious amounts of mockery, and a quick Wikipedia- and Google-search level of factual understanding.”

March 06, 2017

Like last week’s word,stooge, bamboozle – to fool or cheat someone – is not quite what it appears to be. It has nothing to do with booze, whose origin is a Middle Dutch word meaning “to drink a lot.” Nor is it one of those flavorful 19th-century American slang words connoting fraud, like hornswoggle, humbug, and bunkum.

Bamboozle first appeared in England around 1700; the OED says it may have been a thieves’ cant word like fake and phony. Or it may come from a Scots word, bombaze, which is related to bombast and means “perplex.” Or – says the Online Etymology Dictionary – it may be related to the French word embabouiner: to make a fool (literally ‘baboon’) of.”

What we know for sure is that in the first decade of the 18th century, bamboozle was being deplored as one of those newfangled words the English language would be better off without. The Merriam-Webster entry for bamboozle includes this note:

In 1710, Irish author Jonathan Swift wrote an article on “the continual Corruption of our English Tongue” in which he complained of “the Choice of certain Words invented by some pretty Fellows.” Among the inventions Swift disliked were bamboozle,bubble (a dupe), put (a fool), and sham. (Perhaps he objected to the use of sham as a verb; he himself had used the adjective meaning “false” a couple of years previously.) What all these words appear to have in common is a connection to the underworld as jargon of criminals. Other than that, the origin of bamboozle remains a mystery, but the over-300-year-old word has clearly defied Swift's assertion that “All new affected Modes of Speech . . . are the first perishing Parts in any Language.”

February 27, 2017

Before last week, if you’d asked me to guess the history and derivation of stooge, I’d have ventured that it was a bit of thieves’ cant like fake or phony, probably from the golden age of such words: 18th-century London. And I’d have been dead wrong.

The Stooge (1952). From Wikipedia: “In 1930, entertainer Bill Miller [Dean Martin] believes that he has the ability to become a solo performer. He and his partner Ben Bailey split up and go their separate ways. Miller fails miserably, and his manager, Leo Lyman thinks it would be a good idea to perform with a "stooge." Enter Ted Rogers [Jerry Lewis], who plays an accident-prone foil for Miller. Soon afterwards, Miller's act is a hit.”

What if you lose the right to your company name … and the name is your own? When it happened to fashion designer Kate Spade, she changed not only the brand name but her own. (The Fashion Law, via Catchword)

The strange case – as in legal case – of the Hasbro toy hamster named Harris Faulkner and the Fox News anchor named Harris Faulkner: “either a really weird coincidence or some very niche cross-marketing on Hasbro’s part.” (Consumerist)

September 22, 2016

In 1995 there was Clueless, writer/director Amy Heckerling’s updating of Jane Austen’s Emma; the big-screen version begat a TV series by the same name. Last year brought Limitless, another movie-to-TV recycling, this one about “an average 28-year-old man who gains the ability to use the full extent of his brain’s capabilities” and is hired by the FBI as a consultant. It lasted barely a season.

This season, get ready for four TV shows with one-word “-less” titles. Minimalism? Austerity? Theft? Whatever the reason for the trend, good luck keeping them all straight.

September 16, 2016

What if business jargon were made literal and tangible? Artists Isabel + Helen take on that challenge with A Load of Jargon, an installation opening tomorrow at The Conran Shop in London’s Chelsea district. The exhibit turns five buzzwords – “thinking cap,” “big idea,” “next steps,” “easy win,” and “going viral” into visual puns. There’s a public-health imperative behind the humor, notes FastCo Design in a story about the show: “[C]orporate speak isn't just funny sounding (and fuzzy in meaning)—it actually can make you less intelligent.” (Hat tip: Silicon Valley Speak.)